Spotify is outraged: 10,000 users sold their data to train AI

More than 10,000 Spotify users have united in the Unwrapped collective to sell their music data to third-party developers who create AI tools for deeper analysis of streaming habits. This caused serious dissatisfaction with Spotify, which believes that such activities violate its policies.

What happened:

Users sold part of their data (music preferences) to Solo AI for $55,000 via the Vana platform, receiving about $5 in crypto tokens each. Unwrapped developers claim that this is digital self-determination, and users have the right to control and monetise their data. Spotify has sent a warning about the violation of the terms of use, but the Unwrapped team says it has not received any letters.

Conflict of interest:

Spotify believes that Unwrapped violates its "Wrapped" trademark and the ban on using data for AI models.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation supports the right of users to access and export their data, but warns against selling private information for money.

What's next:

Unwrapped plans to expand access to the platform, but claims that Spotify complicates the process of data export by limiting the number of new participants. The developers hope that future laws, such as the Digital Choice Act in Utah, will change the situation in favour of users.

Usually, large digital content platforms prefer to make money on user data by presenting the latter with the famous "we've updated our terms of use policy, there's only an Accept button". But Spotify faces an additional threat - there are dozens of streaming services, and one of the platform's important advantages is algorithms that help to select new songs based on preferences, as well as hundreds of hand-picked playlists. There is a threat that competing companies will simply collect this data, analyse it and create similar tools.